As data-acquisition techniques become more sophisticated and the autonomy of the measurement equipment tends to be better, a new generation of electronic potatoes has been developed such as the Danish made PTR 200, based on tri-axial accelerometers. The main topic of this research was to characterise this newly developed tool. Therefore both laboratory experiments with a pendulum impactor and on-field testing were executed. Characterisation with the pendulum impactor revealed that 22 different impact zones reacted differently on the same energy-input of 0,3525 J. Furthermore a distinct relationship was found between impact force and signal response. On-field testing showed that an increasing damage index as a result of an increasing amount of impacts in the processing chain can be explained by the signal response of the sensor with a confidence of more than 90% in some cases. Depending on the calculated sensor-index the correlation coefficient may vary between 0.82 to 0.93. Copyright (C) 2001 IFAC.